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“Oh, the changes you’ll see!”

As with any educational institution, those in charge at James Madison University made hay while the sun was shining, so to speak, in regards to maintenance and rehabilitation and such during the summer. Every year something happens, but this summer, the changes have been a bit more noticeable than most. For one thing, Potomac Hall finally has a purple sign, as seen at left, as JMU finally changed from the black signs to the purple ones out on the CISAT campus. Then of course expansions at the College Center are finished, as the biggest ballroom from Roanoke to Winchester is finished and open for business, plus a sports-lounge is now down on the first floor. As rehabilitation goes, the famed stairs from D-Hall directly to Godwin Hall got rehabilitated, with the formerly wooden stairs going concrete and looking fine, and in Potomac Hall, the air conditioning was rehabilitated in order to fix a number of persistent problems. Plus let’s not forget Gifford Hall, the residence hall that was under renovation in 2001-2002. It’s now ready to go, with construction fences and such removed. The whole thing about summer vacations makes maintenance fairly easy for education. You have a three-month time frame where you can get your major work done practically undisturbed because the students, for the most part, are gone. Then during the year, you just have to balance the urgency and scope of the problem. If it’s pressing, fix it as soon as possible, but if it can wait, great – defer it until the summer when you’ve got a wide-open period to do all the work you need. In the “real world”, it’s not so nice. Unless you’re really lucky, you’ve got to work around all of an operation’s normal activities and if getting in the way of normal activity is unavoidable, you’ve got to go in, work, and get out as fast as possible. Good comparison is different areas of The Schumin Web’s family of Web sites. I can comfortably close and rehabilitate parts of The Schumin Web and subsidiaries (though generally I try not to close sites unless necessary). However, The Schumin Web’s Online Store and all of StratoSearch need to stay up after they have initially opened regardless of anything else because they’re revenue-earning sections, and thus no closing allowed, no exceptions. Gotta work around the normal activities…